One major program is Gnome DE, it requires systemd as a hard dependency.
That is not true: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/02/19/on-portability/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-and-others-on-linuxs-systemd/
Besides trying as much as it can to do sensationalism (it is a news article),
the article makes points that are precisely the opposite of what you write.
On compatibility (what started this thread): "systemd is compatible with SysV
and Linux Standard Base (LSB) init scripts". On the relation with the Linux
kernel them (you wrote that "Pottering does not care about [it]"), Linus
Torvalds say that he doesn't "actually have any particularly strong opinions
on systemd", only "details, not big issues"; Ted Ts'o say "the bottom line is
that [systemd's developers] are trying to solve some real problems that
matter in some use cases".
And when it comes to the sentence "the GNOME 3.8 desktop and newer now
requires systemd" (the point you actually wanted to make), the associated
link leads to
https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logindsystemd-thoughts/
where you can read the truth repeated over and over (how the article
translates that into "the GNOME 3.8 desktop and newer now requires systemd"
is a mystery... or simply sensationalism):
At most 3 weeks ago I noticed by then already month old thread on gentoo-dev
discussing that GNOME 3.8 has a dependency on systemd. At most this should be
about logind, even though logind is optional. (...) Figuring out why Gentoo
really believes systemd is a requirement took a while to figure out. (...)
Apparently our (=GNOME) assumption that logind was independent from systemd
changed since systemd v205 due to the cgroups kernel change. This is really
unfortunate, but GNOME 3.8 does not require logind. (...) This despite
clarifying that GNOME really does not need systemd, nor logind and trying to
help out with issues.
As an example, systemd started out as, and was promoted as a modern init
systemd is an umbrella project. Not only an init.
however, look at the current list (39 programs)
This is called "modularity". The opposite of "monolithic". You seem to
confuse those terms.
